Keep Our NHS Public (KONP)

Across England NHS patients and local communities have been linking up with nurses, doctors and other health care workers to meet, march, protest and lobby as they fight to stop further closures and cuts in local NHS services. Beds, wards and even whole hospitals are closing down. Thousands of health workers’ jobs are being axed. This is set to continue under the present government, whose election health manifesto makes no mention of the continuing under-resourcing of the NHS.

More time and effort by NHS organisations has to be spent submitting competitive bids for services they are plainly more fit to deliver – against private-health companies whose principal loyalty has to be to shareholders. An unprecedented process of privatisation is under way: vital services and precious NHS resources are being handed over to the private sector, including companies run for profit for shareholders here and overseas. Now is the time to fight back; to Keep Our NHS Public.

The campaign was launched in September 2005 and has won the backing of hundreds of senior http://www.eta-i.org/ambien.html doctors, academics, health workers and trade union leaders, celebrities, MPs and local campaigners. Now we are inviting all those who support our appeal to JOINKeep Our NHS Public, and to work with us to build local broad-based campaigns that can stop and roll back the government policy that is wrecking our NHS.

KONP’s principal aims are:

To inform the public and the media what is happening as a result of the Government’s “reform” programme.

To build a broadly based non-party political campaign to prevent further fragmentation and privatisation of the NHS.

To keep our NHS Public. This means funded from taxation, free at the point of use, and provided as a public service by people employed in the NHS and accountable to the public and Parliament.

To call for a public debate about the future of the NHS and to halt the further use of the private sector.